Masters students at the Royal College of Art in London recently displayed their current projects in a show entitled Work In Progress. These Animal Sense Devices come from students Christ Woebken and Kenichi Okada.

Curiosity and exploration is one of the major desires of children. We believe reality is tune-able and we developed a series of sensory enhancements as experiential prototypes. Can you retrain lost senses and instincts? Can you create an experience of feeling like an animal, even as tiny as an ant? How would kids feel if they can transform through to adults on the same eye level?

The Ant was designed to make kids feel 50x smaller, the Bird to retrain the sense for magnetic fields, and the giraffe to allow children to see on the same eye-level as adults. The giraffe is pretty self explanatory, and the ant one has a little microscopic camera in the right mitt (the little black dot) so you see closeups of the grass and feel small as you crawl around. The bird one though, I don't know about that. I think it lets you know which way the north pole is or something. That or it makes you think you can fly. Which, as my cousin who I tossed off the roof can attest to, kids can't.